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No Stress

Three Tips for Becoming More Resilient

Resilience is the ability to persevere through adversity and come out stronger than you were before.

Resilience is a skill that anyone can learn and apply to any area of their life. People are not “born resilient”; it’s not a personality trait that some have and others do not. People become resilient as they respond to difficulties in their lives.

So the good news is that you can become more resilient. The bad news is that your life requires hardship to develop resilience. Then again, if you were living with the delusion that you could avoid hardship in your life, let me dispel that notion right now. It is not a question of whether you will encounter hardship. It is a question of how you will respond to it.

Turning a Hurdle into an Opportunity

No matter what your particular stress is — client issues, financial anxiety, overwhelmed by technology, opposing counsel’s attitude — changing the way you think about and respond to that stress can turn a dreaded situation into an opportunity for building resilience. One place to start: Make a list of the things in your day that drain you of energy and joy. What would you prefer to avoid or actively wish would magically go away?

While there are many ways of increasing resilience, these three tips will help you to invest your time and energy well.

1. What else could this be? One key component of resilience is the ability to see things from multiple perspectives. You limit your ability to do that when you get locked into interpreting a particular interaction or situation in a fixed way. The classic way of limiting perspective on a stressor is to think of it as a crisis, or impending crisis. “My client is not paying my fee” turns into a fear that this will result in making no money, becoming homeless and starving on the street one day. Any crisis will make you feel a heightened level of stress, which either prompts you to avoid the situation or attack it — the “fight or flight” syndrome.

Asking yourself “what else could this be” is a creative problem-solving technique that helps to challenge your assumptions. Or, another way to put this is to ask: “What is this problem an opportunity for?” Seeing a stressful event as an opportunity will allow you to see potential upsides to a stressor and use it for good. So, for example, a stressful confrontation becomes an opportunity to practice speaking calmly and confidently to an upset client, thereby making you better able to handle these situations.

2. Hobbies — they’re not just for retirement. Games and hobbies are not child’s play or activities you should postpone until retirement. Hobbies and fun activities are essential for creative thinking and well-being. Not only do they provide a way to take a break from work (or constantly thinking about work), they also are an opportunity to use different parts of your brain, interact with others differently and see things from a different perspective.

Feeling stumped about how to handle a problem? Stop trying to solve it. Taking a break and doing something completely different often helps to provide “aha moments” of insight.

3. Friends and family — yes, they’re pretty important. Let’s face it, law school and the demanding legal environment have required you to spend less time with friends and family. It is a necessary sacrifice most lawyers make to get through law school, pass the bar and start a legal career. Unfortunately, what starts as a temporary sacrifice can transform into a lifestyle.

Having a strong social support network is essential to resilience. The most resilient people have a network they feel supported by, know they can turn to for help, and to whom they offer help in a pattern of mutual support. Nothing increases the weight of a burden more than thinking you are alone in that struggle. Talking with friends, family and colleagues can help give you a different perspective, validate your feelings and concerns, and help you think through options that you might not have considered before.

Be Well, Be Resilient

Resilience is a skill that needs resistance to strengthen, not unlike our physical muscles. So look for opportunities to choose to use the barriers in your life as a resilience workout routine. The more you do, the greater sense of control you will feel in your life.

Shawn Healy is a licensed clinical psychologist with Massachusetts Lawyers Concerned for Lawyers, Inc. (LCL). He runs stress management groups for law firms and provides training sessions on time and stress management to bar associations, solo attorneys and law firms. A frequent writer on the topics of conflict resolution, anxiety management, resilience and work-life balance, he is a contributor to the LCL blog and tweets for @LCL_MassLawyers.